


Slipping

by Viridian5



Category: Andromeda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Drama, Episode Related, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-01-27
Updated: 2003-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:25:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rhade tries to keep his hold on Harper.</p><p>(In "The Unconquerable Man" universe)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slipping

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "The Unconquerable Man," "Its Hour Come 'Round at Last," and "The Widening Gyre."
> 
> Many, many people encouraged this.

"Hey, chief," Harper said, looking wan in a way that struck Gaheris as wrong, as he worked on the machine they hoped would put an end to the larvae that were killing him. Gaheris approved of how Harper was taking his fate in his own hands.

"I've come to tell you that I sent Beka a message about your condition," Gaheris said.

"You think she'll come?"

"That has to be the illness talking. It's unworthy of you. You know that she sees you as family."

"The fact that she was your girlfriend makes you totally objective, right?" Harper smiled a little. "I just hope she gets here in time." The too-sweet scent of the serum that had kept the larvae dormant for months seeped out through his pores, as much a taint on his body as the parasites themselves.

Harper was giving up, falling into despair, and for Harper giving up was even less characteristic than looking wan. When they'd first met, Gaheris had taken his size for weakness, a sign of inferiority, but since then he'd learned the strength of the mind in that body and the hidden abilities in that small form. He couldn't be allowed to give up.

Gaheris put his hand on Harper's cheek, behaving in an unusual way himself, but desperate times needed new strategies. "We never surrender."

Harper leaned into it. "Doesn't mean we don't get our asses whupped anyway. I'm just having a dark moment. I'll be better once the Perseids get here." Dying, he tried to put on a brave front for his captain.

"Beka will help as well."

"I miss her."

"As do I."

"If-- When she comes back, she won't stay, you know."

"I know."

It... worried him that if Harper survived, he'd go away with her. She was his family, after all, and he'd only stayed on the Andromeda Ascendant to fight his infestation. Would Trance leave as well? But he shouldn't cling to things he couldn't change....

So many things had been slipping from Gaheris' grasp lately--worlds, Beka, crewmembers--no matter how tightly he held on. Nothing he did seemed to stop the erosion.

"Mmmm," Harper said, and Gaheris realized that he was gently stroking Harper's face. Harper looked up at him with dilated pupils and asked, "Anything I could do for you, boss?" in a low voice. The scent of desire overrode the sickly sweetness of serum and triggered a reciprocal response in Gaheris. He'd sensed this in Harper before but Harper had never made a move, probably out of an unwillingness to interfere with someone Beka had claimed.

Some Nietzscheans, particularly contemporary ones, thought sex with mere humans to be a perversion almost on a par with bestiality and a dangerous distraction, proving themselves to be limited people. Sex was more than mating; it was a bridge, a connection, an expression of life.

"Is there anything you want to do for me right now?" Gaheris asked.

"With the larvae I don't really feel sexy, but somehow that doesn't matter where wanting you is involved. Besides, you stroked first."

"I want you." He did, for several reasons.

"Not as a pityfuck?"

"I don't do pity."

"True." Harper pressed in close. "Maybe it's a 'my favorite blonde has gone away, I had to kill Tyr, the worlds are being pains in the asses, and life has gone to shit lately' fuck?"

"More than that." Then Gaheris thought about what Harper had said. "I never asked you how you felt about how I dealt with Tyr."

Harper jumped a little, in a way that would have been a flinch if he'd let it be. "He kept me alive during the Magog thing, but he spent too much time plotting against you to get to know me. He planned to take you down, and you did what you had to do."

Harper wasn't entirely at peace with it, then. He could be so practical and right-minded in his estimation of the proper way to deal with enemies that Gaheris forgot sometimes that he was not truly homo sapiens invictus in his mind, simply raised on a world misruled by a decadent branch of them, where he'd taken on such ruthlessness as protective coloring. Had Tyr become family to Harper as well?

"Forget it," Harper said as he started to unfasten Gaheris' clothing. "It's done. Over."

Gaheris stroked him just to feel him quiver, wanting to remind Harper's stressed body to live. "This is a 'raging against the dying of the light' fuck."

Harper's smile was full of desire and sex. "Rage away."

They efficiently peeled one another out of their clothing and moved to the cot Harper kept in the machine shop. He mapped the topography of Harper's skin, noting the scars--it had amazed him how weathered the two human Maru members had looked despite their youth--while Harper stroked and pressed on the skin around his bone blades in ways that truly suggested he had some experience with them. Harper's mouth and lung capacity proved to be useful for more than giving vent to fast torrents of twisting words, and he seemed to like mildly rough handling. Ironic how the serum that made him smell so sweet made his skin taste so bitter. Gaheris could hear the larvae moving around a little in Harper's torso and again felt enraged that a member of his crew could have been so violated. This was the kind of obscenity he'd turned against the Commonwealth and Dylan over.

How horrible it had been to find out that the High Guard had been sending classified missions into Magog space the whole time in an effort to stop them, even as publicly they'd stood by the treaty. A waste, all a waste....

Harper bit his nipple and writhed against him in a way that made his skin shiver. "I'm still here."

"You certainly are." And Gaheris intended to keep it that way.

"Then fuck me, huh?"

After initially bringing out the wrong kind of lubricant--"good for gun parts but not so much for me"--Harper finally found the right one somewhere in the clutter and prepared himself as Gaheris watched, fascinated by how open he was in his pleasure as his fingers slid in and out of his body. They kissed hungrily as Harper slicked Gaheris' cock. He groaned at the sensation and the endorphin rush as he thrust in and Harper twined his body around him, pulling him deeper, panting as Gaheris rode him. Eyes open but lost, Harper moved with him and murmured something about good intentions and hell and drawing a map, but then all of his focus returned, and he clenched his muscles in a way that sent Gaheris directly into orgasm. Gaheris returned the favor with a few hard, jerking pulls on Harper's cock.

Gaheris rested for a while, tracing patterns on Harper's skin, until the restlessness started to hit. "Hmm."

Harper smirked. "You can go. Beka told me how you're not big on after-sex snuggles."

"How much did Beka tell you?"

"Oh, lots of things. We're a sick and twisted family, Gaheris. Right now, you should just enjoy the fact that it means I know enough not to be offended."

Gaheris kissed him. "Do you feel better now?"

"Yeah. Git. Go already. Be happy in the knowledge that I'm gonna take a nap now like Trance wanted me to thanks to you wearing me out."

"I shall."

Harper looked happier, less hopeless, while Gaheris felt as if he'd stopped Harper's downward slide into darkness, away from him. In these days, every victory was precious.

  


* * *

Harper let the smile slip away once Gaheris had dressed and left. That vision he'd had while being fucked had been deeply disturbing and killed a lot of his sex buzz. He'd been talking to Dylan Hunt in what had to be the afterlife. Which meant that he'd been dead, like Dylan was. He didn't want to die.

He didn't want to believe it either.

He couldn't tell Gaheris about it, not that Gaheris would believe it to be a true vision anyway. Gaheris would just figure he was going nuts, which he probably was.

Harper doubted it would help at all if he told Gaheris that it seemed like Dylan had forgiven him.

 

### End


End file.
